The Poet Spiel

nibbler  

i find myself wondering why that person, standing right in front of me, appears to be waiting for my response. i don’t know who that is. i don’t know what that outsider has done to expect something from me. i don’t know that person is my best friend.
 
i wonder where i am and how i got here. how i find myself driving but i feel more like a passenger on a ride to somewhere; i don’t know where. so i’m surprised when my car surrenders me to a safer place — seeming like it may have been where i’ve coped with loss as the ordinary functions of my brain are nibbled away. i don’t know i am home.
 
i feel uncomfortable, how my language has become broken; how i speak in halted words because i’ve lost the sense of simple sentences by the time i strain to reach their ends. it’s difficult to mingle when i know i sound barely able to utter what others presume i can say — like i’ve done it so well in the past — yet my words falter.
 
i am frightened as the nibbling disorients my planning and judgment. i can’t even connect how two-plus-two might equal four — same as when i’ve made my list of groceries but i don’t know how the list might deliver what  i need.
 
this dread condition won’t get any better than what i’ve got — 
this daily nibbling at my comprehension.
it will insist on progressing until the day
i cannot find my self at all.

 

The Poet Spiel is a master at risk taking an uncertain world where, harboring the visceral paranoia that accompanies surveillance at our every turn, we wish everything would turn out OK but we are too often disappointed to find out that it does not. Spiel's most recent book, "Dirty Sheets: 28 stories of passion, pathos and payback" is published by Rain Mountain Press.